Only then did Huiwon shift his gaze away from the glass he’d been fixated on and slowly looked around. Here and there, men exchanging casual physical affection without a care for who was watching caught his eye. The open display of it made Huiwon’s own face heat up instead. There are places like this too.
My boyfriend is Italian. That’s actually how I got into Italian desserts. Things have changed a lot to follow trends now, but.
It had been around a month into working under Dogyeong. He’d volunteered that out of nowhere, without Huiwon asking. Dogyeong was a well-built man, nothing like Huiwon — and he’d specifically said boyfriend. Huiwon had wondered if he was maybe talking about a close friend in a roundabout way, but no.
Because one evening when Huiwon was closing up, an Italian man even more solidly built than Dogyeong had come to pick him up, and Huiwon had witnessed him press a kiss to Dogyeong’s lips.
“Isn’t it great?”
Huiwon gave a firm nod at Dogyeong’s words. He liked this space where men could like each other without having to watch themselves. He liked the way his heart was thumping. He liked the alcohol that spread heat through him from the inside.
Ah……. Or maybe everything just feels great because he was getting tipsy.
“Hyung, I’m going to the bathroom.”
He’d been drinking so happily and eagerly that now he needed to go.
Huiwon was walking perfectly straight, but the people around him kept swaying. They all seemed drunk.
“Hey! You!”
Not realizing he was being called, Huiwon was already at the urinal with his hand at his waistband when someone abruptly grabbed his shoulder and yanked him around. His vision spun, and the person in front of him came into blurry focus.
“What.”
He was annoyed that his body had swung around so helplessly, and once it did, his head buzzed and his stomach turned unpleasantly.
“Hey. Give me your phone.”
“Why would you need my phone…….”
Huiwon scrunched his face in a glare and met the other person’s eyes, and the guy laughed softly.
“Who said I’m stealing it? I’m saying let’s be friends — give me your number.”
Friends.
Huiwon quietly mouthed the word. It felt unfamiliar. When he was young, he was poor — and as the son of the neighborhood’s notorious drunk, the local adults didn’t want their children hanging around with him. And during his adolescence…… he’d dropped out not long after starting high school.
“Come on, hurry.”
Like the word friend had cast a spell on him, Huiwon pulled his phone out of his pocket and held it out. The man took it, typed in his own number, hit call to pull up Huiwon’s number on his own phone, and handed it back.
“Yoon Jiwon. That’s my name.”
The next day, Huiwon was added to a group chat. The group chat Yoon Jiwon had added him to moved fast with messages. The slang and abbreviations were hard to follow completely, but just the fact of being part of a lively, buzzing space made him happy.
“We’re drinking — come hang out.”
After that, he met up with them at Deep Red two more times. The first time he’d gone without thinking twice, Huiwon had second-guessed himself when he got there — but contrary to his worries, the group welcomed him, and the strong drinks that went down so easily quickly dissolved the awkwardness. Talking back and forth with people his own age was enjoyable, and it felt good being introduced to others as a friend.
“Told you, didn’t I? He’s pretty. Not bad, right?”
“If we get some stuff into him and catch him drunk, he won’t be able to report anything.”
“Hey. I’m doing it too. Don’t leave me out.”
The group was whispering about Huiwon among themselves, but Huiwon didn’t know.
“We’ve got a birthday party next week. Want to come?”
Birthday party……. Huiwon looked up. Everyone was looking at him with expressions that said you’re coming, right? Huiwon nodded right away.
“We’re going to eat cake.”
“Oh…… I’m really good at cake.”
Because he was good at making cakes, he’d thought he’d make a big, beautiful one to bring. That was all he’d thought. He really had.
Hyeonho hadn’t been able to stop thinking about Huiwon since running into him at the scene. He’d been hovering around Team 4 when Huiwon’s voice rose sharply, and he pushed his way into the Team 4 office.
Huiwon’s shoulders were trembling with how hard he was seething.
“How dare I? You little — you went and got yourself doped up and now you’re acting like you did something right? Huh?”
“Ah, what the f——”
“Detective Seo!”
The saving grace was that it was his colleague Detective Seo interrogating Huiwon, which gave Hyeonho enough standing to insert himself between them. Huiwon looked up at Kang Hyeonho from where he sat in the chair. His face was twisted with a mix of outrage and indignation, but he seemed to recognize Hyeonho.
Ah, what a hassle, honestly. Hyeonho looked between the still-grumbling Detective Seo and the seething Huiwon in turn, then quietly slid the plastic container on the table toward Huiwon.
“I didn’t do anything! I didn’t do anything wrong!”
Huiwon’s voice climbed again. Maybe it was because Hyeonho was a familiar face — that might have made him bolder. Hyeonho set his expression into something firm and looked down at Huiwon with a steady gaze. It was a urine test that had to happen either way, and there was nothing to be gained by dragging it out.
Even more so — if Huiwon was telling the truth and hadn’t taken anything.
“Alright. If you don’t want to, that’s your call. But if what you’re saying is true and you haven’t taken anything, cooperating and getting out of here is what’s good for you. If you keep holding out and we come back with a warrant, then we’ll have to do a forced catheterization. You’d be strapped into a chair while they insert a catheter into your urethra——”
His tone was calm, measured, almost coaxing — but the message underneath was clear enough: if you don’t do it now, things are going to get a lot worse for you. Huiwon understood completely. His face flushed red, he pressed his lips together tightly, grabbed the plastic container, and headed for the bathroom.
“He has no prior record, and we’re still just at the investigation stage — isn’t that a bit much?”
Once Huiwon was gone, Hyeonho addressed Detective Seo’s conduct. Doesn’t he know the presumption of innocence? The drug test hadn’t even been run yet, and the way he’d been treating Huiwon was unnecessarily skewed.
“Can’t you tell just by looking? You really still know this little about how things work? You’re still so green.”
Detective Seo leaned back deeply in his chair and clicked his tongue at Kang Hyeonho like he had a long way to go.
“Still, though……”
“And do you know what kind of people those guys are? Do you know what kind of place we went to tonight?”
Detective Seo stretched his lips flat in a long grimace of revulsion.
Hyeonho cast his mind back to the scene. Given that Detective Seo was grumbling about it like it disgusted him, his first thought was — a prostitution establishment? But as he replayed the memory, that didn’t seem right. It had been an ordinary bar, people chatting over drinks, music playing.
“That place is a gay bar.”
Detective Seo shook his head rapidly, as if trying to shake off something unclean. Hyeonho felt the words hit him like something had struck his skull.
Like rewinding a recording, he went back through the scene slowly in his mind. Now that he thought about it — there hadn’t been any women. And when they’d entered the room, there had been a moment where he’d instinctively turned his head away. A scene he’d made an effort to avert his eyes from and wipe from his mind.
Men tangled together. They had been kissing, hands moving over each other’s bodies. The resurfaced memory made Hyeonho’s body stiffen for a moment.
“Nothing better to do, so they go and do that filthy shit.”
“…….”
“Kang Hyeonho, you say something too. Now that you know, doesn’t it gross you out too? What do you think someone like him was doing at a place like that. Seriously. Came to eat cake? More like he came to eat men!”
By Detective Seo’s own logic — even if Huiwon hadn’t taken drugs, that was still a gay bar, and that room had been a space only invited guests could enter. And Huiwon had shown up there.
Detective Seo kept pouring out a stream of hate-laced words. Things like psycho, things like social menace — unfiltered, saying whatever came to him, occasionally turning to Hyeonho for agreement. Hyeonho let every word wash past him and rubbed at his dry face. He tried to picture Huiwon among the men who’d been sprawled together on that sofa, but the image wouldn’t form easily.
Thud.
The sound of plastic hitting the desk surface snapped him back. In front of Hyeonho stood Huiwon, the back of his neck flushed red.
“…….”
Huiwon glanced at Hyeonho once, then dropped into his seat. The corners of his eyes were red too. When Detective Seo began running through the routine questions, Hyeonho turned on his heel with a dazed expression and walked out of the Team 4 office.
Back in Team 1, as he tried to organize what he needed to report to the team chief, he couldn’t focus at all. Was it the shock of witnessing gay men for the first time in his life — or was it the fact that Huiwon, someone whose face he knew, had turned up at that place, that was scattering his concentration?
